In order to rebrand the coinjudge image, we have taken feedback from our readers and are in the midst of implementing them.

Coin Judge is a place where we are to keep an open mind, when investing. I understand that some of you are heavily invested in X and so when you see an argument against X, it is only natural to go on the offensive.

This is not what we are trying to achieve here at coin judge. There are always two sides to a coin and even though you are fixed in yours, you must learn to acknowledge the reasoning behind someone else's and admit your mistakes.

Based on what I have said above. Here are the new rules. This list is not exhaustive.

Comments or posts using the words Shill, FUD and moon , will be removed regardless of the rest of the content. Persistent offenders will be banned.

If your post is highlighting the negatives of a company, it must also highlight at least two positives. The opposite is also true.

You must not attack the person making the claims by using name calling or questioning their agenda.

3a. Baseless claims such as "X is the best" or "X will be the best coin just look at their white paper" will also be removed.

3b. The art of saying something yet saying nothing at the same time. If you are asked a question, as a founder, you must answer the question to the best of your knowledge. If there is a fault in your company, avoiding the question with long elaborate paragraphs and words will not put you into a better position.

Profanity is restricted as the aim is to have a reasonable discussion.

Posts by a user who has done no research on the matter, will be removed.

Titles must follow the following structure:

CoinName - Red Flags

CoinName - Discussion

ICOSubmit - CoinName - Short Description

ICOSubmit Posts must follow the following format:

- Coin Name
- Coin Goal
- Short Description of the white paper
- Possible Risks
- State 3 or more red flags for this project.
- What are the advantages of the token
- Explanation on why the project needs a token and why fiat cannot be used
- Why are you different than your competitors
- Other

The objective of ICOSubmits is for founders/ members of that team to get feedback on their product. Therefore we would like for only those who are a part of the company to submit an ICOSubmit.

the idea is fantastic dont get me wrong, i was going to buy some, but i do my due diligence first. white paper (which lacked a lot of detail) but i read the architectural document, which fleshed out what they wanted to do. sounded awesome. so i went to look at the team. i also asked some questions on telegram which no one could answer given my doubts below.

on the dragon chain site there are 3 devs, 1 lead dev and 2 regular devs. all devs have only worked at Disney. the lead dev was doing the kinda work regular devs do like i do. u can see this in his linkedin profile. then he got involved in block chain at disney i presume towards the end of the 4 year stint. he was an intern there then became a dev, has 4 1/2 years experience. no other dev workplace experience.

block chain development is magnitudes harder than regular line of business application development as i have 10 years of experience in this area building line of business applications.

the other 2 devs, similar story, intern, dev at disney, no other jobs as a dev. now they are block chain devs...

so then i hopped over to their github repo, it was public for a while and has now been recently made private. i downloaded the github repo. and imo this is some pretty crappy code. the repository layer was sub par. string concatenation to form queries? this is not production quality code. crappy unit tests and not many at all. The number of lines of code in the entire repo was very small. very little in the smart contracts portion. if you look at the contributors, there are about 10 people, but only 2 with active contributions, the rest had one or 2 commits; and even with the 2 main contributors the contributions were not often. overall i was not impressed at all, by the quality of the code and lack of contributions overall.

the roadmap for 2018 is highly aggressive. from what ive seen from the code, im doubtful they can meet their targets. the protocol they are developing is quite advanced and the targets ambitious.

Proof Of Weak Hands(powh) is a dApp that is powered by the ethereum blockchain. Those who hold onto tokens, will get a portion from those who buy and sell. Those who bought in early are being paid by those who are new or those who decide to sell. If no-one decides to sell or buy, those who are holding onto the coin will see a depreciation in their asset. For this reason, powh can be seen to be a ponzi scheme.

Th master-node incentive which rewards users for recruiting others, is a pyramid scheme.

Powh was first deployed with an overflow bug which allowed a hacker to steal $800k. The contract was then rescinded, fixed and launched again. The bug that was present in the smart contract was a fairly easy mistake to spot and one which should have not passed the testing stage.

Therefore, we at coinjudge decided to inspect the code of the new contract to see what we could find.

Judging by the overuse and immature nature of the comments, the code was probably not written by a professional but by a teenager.

The code uses functionality that Ethereum now discourages such as "this.balance" in place of "address(this).balance".

Line267, uses the 0x0 address as a band-aid for accidental transfers to the Ethereum smart contract.

The lead developer(mantso) is also the administrator of the contract. He or she attempted to use hashing to obfuscate this fact from those inspecting the smart contract.

Line692 and Line727 declares two functions; ethereumToTokens and TokensToEthereum. Both functions are un-readable and the comments state that "hopefully we gave you the whitepaper with it in scientific notation". They did not. These two functions, from experience are suspected to contain some sort of error or obfuscation, due to the fact that the whole formula was written as one.

Line193 shows that there are 24 accounts called "ambassadors" that were granted early access. The ambassadors themselves were initially restricted to 1 ether, so as to not become "whales". The identity of these ambassadors however are not confirmed and so it could be the case that only one or a select few individuals control all 24 accounts.

Ponzi Schemes are now becoming harder to spot in the crypto sphere. However, it is still extremely hard to write good code for a Ponzi scheme or a bad project with which you have no plan to sustain.

This is, to me, the gold standard for a high quality project. Well documented, carefully explained, not a scam. Lots of deep information throughout. Everything this guy says as far as I can tell is solid, though I don't understand a lot of it, it's clearly not some BS pump and dump riding on the hype of the bitcoin name. This is worth looking into as this guy goes into a lot of good, technical details on a lot of relevant economics concepts about what's actually going on in the bitcoin space. Even if this project is doomed to failure for one reason or another, just investing the time and energy in understanding what he is saying seems worth it to be able to navigate this space more effectively.

Just as how Bitcoin is built on top of the Blockchain and other technologies.

Hedera is built on top of Hashgraph.

Hashgraph has been marketed as an alternative to Bitcoin. This is not a fair comparison, due to Bitcoin being open source and decentralised. Hedera is Open Review, meaning that you cannot fork or copy the code, you can however review it, before running the software and do your checks. This is a good middle ground for companies that would like to release software, without fear of another actor copying and renaming it.

Hedera has 39 members that hold governance over the code. This makes Hedera an inherently centralised solution, albeit an "intentionally" centralised platform. With Bitcoin, centralisation can come through the majority of miners being in one pool or being controlled by one actor. Hence, it is important to note that Bitcoin can be centralised, it would however not be according to the design of the Bitcoin network.

Allegedly, the 39 members are separated globally and own Blue Chip companies. They also include members from the parent company. The 39 at this very moment are anonymous. If Hedera does grow to a global scale, then nations will have enough power to sanction the 39 and or their companies, indirectly regulating Hedera. Now since the software is patented, we cannot decide to go to an alternative, if we do not like the setup.

Furthermore, the ICO stage is only open to accredited investors. A company can do what they choose, however since they use a Proof Of Stake model, this would mean that accredited investors and those in partnership with Hedera, will have the majority of stake and have the majority of voting power in the system.

Hedera does solve some of the problems of Bitcoin, it however introduces it's own set of problems like regulation. I do not believe that Hedera can truly be a decentralised platform due to it being a POS system whereby accredited investors get to buy first, and the governance council who have control over the code. It is important to remember that control over the code, means control over the consensus rules.

We have not discussed the technological differences between Bitcoin and Hedera because it would be like comparing apples to oranges.

Thanks for reading, would love to hear your opinions on this.

If you are a programmer and or want to learn how the blockchain works, our parenting youtube channel will provide videos on the technical aspects to the blockchain, code reviews, tax explanation, and ELI5 videos for the non technical:

Tests were also made on the aws infastructure, I do not believe that companies should be doing latency tests and tps test on aws, as it is not a true representation of the real world. AWS has private networks that are run only by amazon and make it so that things like latency between regions are non-existent. Here is a video of an amzaon speaker outlining it: https://youtu.be/uj7Ting6Ckk?t=1m14s

Hi Guys - I have been part of the community and although being a silent lurker, respect hard work of the individuals. and yesterday after clicking a google ad, I stumbled upon this nice looking website where everything was fine. Looks legit, talks legit, must be legit. NO

started with team members. the top 3 team members look like run of the mill, successful white collar guys, and they ooze sincerity. I did a google search on the top 3 execs. NOTHING. literally nothing. neither on linkedin or on google. moreover, they have used names coinciding with famous ppl so the search result is diluted. Also, did google image search and found nothing.

I reached out on their telegram to talk to admin, and asked why team's profile is not public. they said, it will be in some time. and in 10 min, they blocked me from the telegram. the telegram had 8,000 members who are definitely going to loose money. I can bet 1000 dollars on that. it does kills me that users can't do this much due diligence and figure that.

I am also involved in a project and it is hard work. it does hurt to see other blatant scam projects swooping in millions of dollars. This is ridiculous. please upvote, do your research, and spread the message if you find this true.

CoinJudge was initially created to bring awareness to the corruption and ill-intent of the ICOs and companies in the cryptocurrency community.

Fast forward to now and we believe that the best way to help others is to first educate them. One problem with most blockchain solutions, is that they are not mainstream friendly. Mainstream consumer technology has been delivered in a way that, the customer does not need to think too much about how to get from A to B. This is one of the main downsides of using cryptocurrencies; the consumer has to think too much. Mainstream adoption will arrive when the user experience of using blockchain technology rivals that of the current financial mainstream applications; banking apps, social media platforms.

In short, you can have the fastest car in the world, but if I don't know how to drive, what use is it to me? How do you get someone to appreciate a fast car, without them ever having driven a car? It's a lot different when you are in the passenger seat. Similarly, how do you get a user to appreciate blockchain technology when they do not understand how to send ether.

We at Coinjudge have been coming up with a lot of solutions:

The first solution we came up with was the most direct. This is to teach cryptocurrencies to those that want to learn. The youtube channel TheLondonBlockChain is geared towards those who want to learn more about blockchain technology and other non technical aspects about the community such as taxes.

Secondly, Coinjudge will continue to operate and be a safe haven for people to express their doubts and worries about a certain company without being labelled negatively. We will also be a safe haven for those who want constructive criticism on their own projects related to the crypto community.

Our last solution is to create applications that are ran by the community. For example, taxing software. We would like for there to be centralised solutions such as portfolio and tax management that can only operate, if their incentives align with the community. A decentralised tax solution is currently not possible to our knowledge, if you have any ideas on how this can be implemented, we would be happy to hear.

Credits is an open blockchain platform with smart contract capabilities, similar to Ethereum. They have made claims such as "More than One million transactions per second(tps) and low transaction fees"

Outlined in a previous post regarding credits, we see that the alpha version could easily be hacked and was not built with security in mind. If a hacker knew roughly what time you created your account, then it is possible for him to access your account and steal your funds.

This from a company that touts one million tps, is worrying, because if you cannot make an alpha that conforms to the security standard of every app that uses encryption, then how can we expect you to pull through with your even bigger promise?

Note that visa is capable of handling more than 24,000 transactions per second.

They did come out with an explanation, stating that they were rushed and so that is why their alpha used vulnerable algorithms, plus they did state that in their white paper, they would be using a different one more secure one with good practices.

For those that do not do programming, this is equivalent to saying that you are going to the shop to buy apples, then come back with oranges. Even though there were apples in stock. For me, this is not a valid excuse, as it would not be hard to switch out the two algorithms.

It still does not answer the question of "Why was an RNG used that did not conform to perfect secrecy? By using Date.now() ,Math.random() and the users password as the components of it, the video posted previously showed how easy it was for a hacker to gain access?"

What I did with the above question, was preyed on the fact that most of those that are in cryptocurrency do not know much about the underlying technology, and most would wholeheartedly agree or avoid the question in general. What I think, and I hope that I am wrong, is that this what Credits is doing.

One reason that I believe this to be true, is based upon the code that they submitted days after the negative criticism that they received.

For those that are not into programming, the code submitted is analogous to the following situation:

A man says that he can cook the best food in the world. He is then asked to prove it, and instead of bringing a plate of his best cooked meal, he brings a broken plate.

For those that are programmers:

The code is incomplete, look at the include statements, we see reference to modules that are not included in the repo, meaning that the code was never meant to be compiled/ran.

The code although not very clear, seems like it is meant to create network sockets for the P2P program, this is not something that needs to be patented. So it begs the question to ask why they did not include the whole network module.

The coding practice is terrible and no professional with a year or more of experience would code like this; Go to line 34, the function ClReceiveRequestThread. Line 69 is the start of the for loop within that function. Line 82 is an if statement within the for loop. We are now one level deep. Line 192 is the start of another function within ClReceiveRequestThread, with a switch statement. We are now two levels deep. Line 197 has a case statement which leads into another switch statement. We are now three levels deep. Line 203 has a case statement which leads into an if statement, we are now four levels deep. On Line 211, we have an if statement within the previous if statement, so we are not five levels deep. It is a clear sign of a beginner programmer, when we see multi layered logic statements. As a programmer, it would be hell to debug this code, and it is just one file, with arguably the easiest part.

These are major red flags and from the code that we have seen, it speaks volumes to the competence of the team in regards to coding a platform that can perform one million tps.

If they can perform one million tps, then they might be regarded as one of the best blockchain solutions to date, and could lead the way to the next generation of blockchains. We may not even need networks such as lightning, due to speed and smart contract capabilities of Credits.

Would like to hear what you guys think about Credits, discussion on any points brought up is welcomed.

I present to you STF coin, which is a token that would be integral to our anti-counterfeiting and infringement platform. Meaning that STF would connect companies/individuals to crowdsourcing to alert the said companies/persons to counterfeits of their products and services. An example of this would be a company posts a job on their decentralized network for “doers” (their term for the individuals doing the hunting) to find instances of people counterfeiting their handbags. The “doer” would send photos, screenshots, or video proof of the infringement and then, if approved by the company, the “doer” would be paid in STF tokens, which at press is about .52 cents (USD). There would be a rating system for all parties to ensure that the companies pay for proof and that “doers” are honest and submitting quality proof.

Risks: That the platform does not take off and there aren’t enough companies/persons populating said platform. They aren’t on any exchanges as of press (they are working on Binance and Kucoin as their primary exchanges)

Red Flags:

People cannot use or move tokens until ICO is over.

Some people may not like the project because it is based out of Eastern Europe.

There is only a prototype app for “doers” and an alpha webservice as of press (less than 15 days to ICO)

Not on any exchanges yet.

Advantages:

The global loss by 2022 due to counterfeits would be 2.81 trillion dollars. This is a huge problem, and the individual law firms and contract firms have only been partially successful in stemming the tide because the problem is so pervasive. Crowdsourcing worldwide, increases the number of eyes and ears, by a huge order of magnitude. The main problem of counterfeiting is that companies, most times, are not aware that they are being counterfeited and who to go after. Using the crowd to be counterfeit hunters in their daily lives will help companies identify and act against counterfeiters that they previously did not know about. STF uses smart contracts to be a sort of middle men/women to make sure both parties are satisfied with everyone’s work and so no hacking or other mischief can be done because the block chain is immutable.

Why Fiat cannot be used

There must be a sort of a middleman/middle women to ensure that both parties are honoring their commitments. With fiat, one person must pay first (or make expensive legal contracts), and that can cause problems with one party being dissatisfied. The STF platform can used to keep both parties honest and to make sure only the best companies and “doers” are on the platform. Secondly, since the platform, will be worldwide, a company may not be able to be paid in their preferred currency (they would have to change it to the local currency). With STF token everyone is being paid in a uniform token, and they can choose to turn it into local fiat through their local exchange. This simplifies things greatly.

Why we are different:

Surprisingly, STF does not have many competitors. Right now, it would only be the law firms and protection firms that are extremely expensive and are not able to be everywhere at once. STF is worldwide, 24/7, and will present a significant reduction in cost over the traditional avenues of counterfeit and infringement detection. Even, if the token reaches sky-high prices, the STF service will still be cheaper than the traditional services (and STF could always alter the token price per service in scenarios like this).They are not just looking for billable hours like so many law firms; STF is looking to make the world a better place by turning everyone into a crime fighter and having them get paid to do so.

Other:

STF just partnered with Dogezer service to improve both services. STF is also very good about sticking to their roadmap and I have not found one instance where they deviated.

A Ddos attack is where a website is flooded with too much traffic, causing the website or host to become unavailable for some period of time. This has happened to Reddit and other big companies in the past.

In order to prevent Ddos attacks, most companies have a "filter" which sorts the bad users who are trying to flood the website for malicious reasons, from the good users. This is known as DDos mitigation.

The other way is to distribute the workload to servers in different locations, this would make it harder for a Ddos attack to happen, as there is no longer a central server to attack. This is known as a Decentralised Delivery System(DDS). DDS is a lot more effective at preventing Ddos attacks compared to Ddos mitigation, however it is also a magnitude more expensive too. Gladius claim to be able to do this at a fraction of the price of the current centralised providers.

Cloudflare is in some ways, the centralised counterpart to what Gladius is doing.

With Gladius, 'miners' are now contributors. Contributors form mining pools. Pools will get paid to do the 'filtering' process and once filtered, contributors will be served up a copy of the website requested. Each pool will have varying prices, set by the pool host. Competition from other hosts, will or should drive down the cost of each pool.

If I as a website owner, want to use Gladius to prevent Ddos attacks, I would buy Gladius token, connect to the closest pool and all traffic will be filtered by them, where each pool will, as mentioned above have a copy of my website.

One factor in Gladius succeeding, is converting current website owners to switch from cloudflare to Gladius. If Gladius does not get enough website owners then the mining pools will not make money and the ecosystem will not work.

So first I was looking at Ocoin and Datx all seem to be closely linked to TRX although it is stated that they do not require Tron to succeed as still on ECR20, Ocoin is already supported by Obike as a use for the token but a lot of energy appears to be going into promoting DatX.

There has been little further promotion that I have seen on twitter etc promoting the coin.

It has been given a new website Ocoins.cc

I was wondering what the thoughts were on the interlinked between these coins both within the managerial teams and the cross promoting?

Are they working on a larger project or are they assisting with promoting and hyping each other?

Datx was lined up as an airdrop for holders of Ocoin - it is an advertising base and had only one across my radar with this distribution. Which Is supposed to happen three days after it is listed in an exchange - smart move to prevent price drop or is it to allow initial investors to unload first?

Coin Goal: To make purchasing cryptocurrencies as easy as buying a cup of coffee.

Short Description of the white paper:
Driiven will provide an index fund based on HODL5. The fund will be equally divided among the top 5 cryptocurrencies and rebalanced once per month. This simple strategy in backtesting results, resulted in a 9000% gain and turned $10,000 into over $1,000,000 in a 1 year period.

Possible Risks:
Just like all index funds there is always a risk of your investment going down in value.

Possible red flags:
Main red flag is if we don't meet our budget during the ICO then we will issue a buyback for all tokens purchased.

What are the advantages of the token:
One of the largest advantages to our ICO is we have a guarantee buyback program. If we don't meet our budget of the 50,000 tokens sold then we will buyback all tokens sold. We want this project to succeed as much as you, but we need a bare minimum of 50,000 tokens sold in order to get started.

Explanation on why the coin needs a token:
The token is required to buy into the fund. It’s very similar to pre-payment of a front-end load fee. And this allows us to continue to finance the development of the fund. A dashboard is planned to allow users to track their performance as well as allow buying and selling the fund at any time.

Why are you different than your competitors:
The closest competitor, bitwise investments, does not hold the top cryptocurrencies equally, but instead bases their holdings on the market cap. This causes the index to be extremely skewed toward bitcoin only, because of the sheer market cap that bitcoin holds. This leads to smaller gains because altcoins tend to have larger swings and greater gains then bitcoin itself.

LoyalCoin Solution: Create one loyalty program, where points from each merchant are converted to loyalty tokens. Loyalty tokens can then be used to make purchases from another merchant and or convert to another cryptocurrency.

LoyalCoin is based in the Philippines and they say they already have the current partnerships , just without the blockchain. This does not mean that their current partnerships are willing to join their program, just that they are in that sector already and have somewhat of an influence, in the phillipenes. Video of CEO will be posted at the bottom saying this.

Pros:

The loyalty program is a sector that is ripe for disruption, and if LoyalCoin can successfully enter and dominate the market, they could become a monopoly. Depending on who you are, this could be a pro or a con.

Most customers do not care about loyalty programs, and this could be a way to bring more emphasis towards loyalty programs, allowing for an increase in sales across the retail sector.

Cons:

Crypto is not mainstream as of yet, so even though the idea is good. They must also convince existing customers and businesses that they should switch over. This is a marketing problem and even though they may be able to convince users in the Phillipenes to use their tokens, it does not stand to argue that the rest of the world will follow.

Building on the previous point. Companies use loyalty programs so that customers are loyal to only their company. LoyaltyCoin must now give them an incentive as to why they should now allow their points to be converted to Loyal tokens and then used across many different merchants including their competitors.

EOS will look to become one of the biggest Blockchain Operating Systems (BOS) to date. Other companies in this sector include Stellar and Ethereum.

EOS will use parallel execution to execute 1 Million transactions per second. The age long argument that Blockchain will never be able to replace VISA/Mastercard might be coming to an end.

However, one drawback to EOS is, Delegated Proof Of Stake(DPOS). Which is in contrast to Proof-Of-Work.

In a nutshell, DPOS is a system in which by you vote or delegate responsibility to a node or a select few nodes to validate the blockchain for you. They then send you a portion of the rewards they get for validating the network.

DPOS is much more energy efficient than POW, however if the majority of those delegated to validate the network, are for example the developers, then they will have the power to choose who the witnesses are and essentially dictate what code or transactions are approved. Defeating the purpose of decentralisation.

Another drawback of EOS is Dan Larimer, the creator. He is widely respected as the 'man' akin to how Satoshi is synonymous with Bitcoin. The problem with this and I believe Satoshi may have realised this, is that you cannot have a truly decentralised system, if one individual has such a heavy influence on it. Especially, when he has so many projects that he is working on; Steemit.

EOS compared to Ethereum will allow users to write smart apps in the main programming languages, making it more appealable to developers, and one factor in determining what BOS comes out with the most market shares are the developers who will be developing the apps.

There is an argument to be made about their token sale; the ICO lasts for one year, and is hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. However, those ERC-20 Tokens will have no use on the EOS network because it is not Ethereum based. The tokens are essentially worthless to the asset they are backing. Once the EOS network is up, you can then trade these ERC20 Tokens for EOS tokens, using your private keys.

Question 21. When will I receive native cryptographic tokens on the EOS Platform?

Paraphrasing the answer, we see that for user X to build on top of the EOS platform, he must first get approval from someone who owns 15% of the total supply. Once he gets approved, users may then convert their ETH to EOS tokens via user X's software. Note that your ETH tokens are locked 23 hours after the ICO. This means that if no-one finds a use and gets approved for the EOS network, then your tokens are non-usable. This is unlikely, and the real red flag in this scenario, which we alluded to earlier, is the power that some individuals will have over the whole network.

Lucyd claim to be building 'next-generation' smart glasses on a decentralised AR Ecosystem.

Karl Gutag will discuss this further on.

They also claim that "Citizens of the US, China and Singapore may not participate in our token generation event"

The company is based in Singapore, yet citizens from Singpore may not participate in your token generation event. Why is this?

You may see this recurring phrase amongst many white papers, and have no idea what it means.

This is because you cannot sell something that does not exist. This is a fund-raiser. Since this is a "fund to build" project, then the Lucyd Token is therefore a security, which makes it subject to regulations in the countries they have stated above.

In order to avoid regulation by the SEC, they put in that little disclaimer.

Another red flag is the fact that they are launching a tech based company and along with having no prototype, have no CTO. They have a software engineer that has experience with mobile development; however this is a different domain to AR altogether.

Now, as Coin Judge does not have an AR specialised team member, we have outsourced the discussion of the white paper to Karl Gutag.

"Karl Guttag has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), memory architecture, display devices (LCOS and DLP) and display systems including Heads Up Displays and Near Eye Display (AR and VR)"

The failure to spell instructions and the fact that the youtube video is a one minute screencast of the founder shows the effort that was put into making this exchange.
Note that the lack of effort in creating this website is a red flag, however it is not enough to mark it as a scam.

The standard of this website is generally poor; the 'exchange' part is just a form with a drop down list for example.

The final red flag which was discovered and one that ultimately tilted the verdict of this Exchange as a scam, is the lack of a white paper and a road map.

If you are launching an ICO, the white paper and road map are crucial in informing external parties and investors, of what they are investing in. For this reason, CryptoWolf has been added as a scam.